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The Fourth Way to Nowhere

- the search for cosmic consciousness and the triumph of the ordinary -
a quest for the meaning of life, a critical analysis of the teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, and my twenty-seven-year membership of a fourth way cult

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In this blog I am serialising some chapters of my book, The fourth way to nowhere.

Publication date 7 September 2021
Book links:
or search on Martin Braybrooke

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The book is a careful critique of a whole set of beliefs related to, but not exclusive to, the fourth way path of inner development. At the same time it is a personal history of how the author, despite a modern education, got drawn into a cult, and believed (to quote the White Queen in Alice), at least ‘six impossible things before breakfast.’

Those readers already familiar with the fourth way, and perhaps even members of one or other of the organisations that have sprung up in connection with it, should find the analysis in these pages useful and perhaps challenging. There are indeed ideas in the fourth way worth considering, not least the idea of self-remembering, which has a lot in common with more recent movements such as mindfulness. There are other ideas which are questionable, or remain to be proven, such as the fourth state of consciousness or the idea of recurrence: Ouspensky’s version of re-incarnation. No genuine seeker after truth should be deterred from asking her- or himself, “what do I really know, what is merely provisional, and what is likely to turn out to be wrong?”

This is also a plea that one aim of any spiritual or psychological practice or movement should be kindness, if humanity is to survive the various catastrophes that now threaten it, and an assertion that aspirants to self-development can arrive, with the right efforts, at a place where it is no small achievement to be content to being ordinary.

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As Alice might have said, “What is the use of a book without footnotes?” The book has footnotes (omitted from the extracts in this blog), sometimes referring the reader to original sources, sometimes to expand on incidents in the Fourth Way school of which I was a member, and sometimes to expand critically on the Fourth Way ideas. 

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  1. Anonymous24 September 2021 at 08:15

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